Treehopper Ant

That’s not an ant perched on top of another bug—that’s a species of treehopper called the Cyphonia clavata, which has adapted to grow a realistic ant-shaped protrusion on its back. There is no limit to the variety of ways these incredible insects evolve to adapt in even the harshest of environments.

In this example, the Cyphonia mimics an insect notoriously difficult to prey upon—a local tree ant— all the way down to the spikes that protrude from the ant’s back—which is why it’s so unappetizing to predators in the first place. This species of treehopper was first discovered in 1788 by Caspar Stroll, an entomologist from Germany, and can be found in the rainforests of Central America.

Spinner Direction?!?!

What direction is this Spinner going?!?

Balloons Pop

Butterfly Eye

Statue of Lightning

Surface Swimming

Water Hat

Whales Up

Mentos and Soda

Who Moves - sky or us?

Candle 'Trick'

Arrow vs. Concrete

Sledding Inertia

Prince Rupert's Drop

Bubble Freeze

A bubble in freezing temperatures.

Smart Crow

A crow solves a challenge.

Weight Distribution

Tears in Space

This is what it would look like to cry in space.

Underwater Cable

This is a cross section of a deep sea underwater cable.

Levitation Melting

Levitation Melting of Metal

Humpbacks Bubble Feeding

Humpback Whales have developed a hunting strategy where they circle underwater while emitting a continuous stream of bubbles - creating a wall that "traps" fish in a column of water. They then can converge and consume all of fish that are "trapped" in their bubble net.

Invisible Polymer

A polymer is invisible when submerged in liquid, but visible when in open air.

Launching Ships

This is how engineers launch giant battleships from boatyards - into the water.

Volcano from Space

This is a volcano as viewed from the International Space Station.

Snake Venom

What happens when snake venom enters blood.

Looking through Water

Images shift when looking through water.

Geyser before it Erupts

A geyser right before it erupts.

Changing Forces

Changing Forces

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion - unless they're about to hit something...HARD! Using science - what is going to happen to this truck next? Where will it end up? What about the pole? Why do you think that?

Hot Pistol Shrimp

The shrimp uses the giant claw to snap so hard that it briefly heats the water to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bike Aerodynamics

Bike Aerodynamics

Bikes have been designed to be as aerodynamic as possible - what could possibly make them any faster?

Camels or Shadows?

This is a picture taken directly above these camels at sunset in Saudi Arabia.

Ladybug flight

Ladybird beetles (commonly known as ladybugs) are not the most aerodynamic insect, yet are able to fly through a complicated set of body structures.

Snake-ing Along

Snakes use their muscles and scales to move. Because they don't have arms or legs, they need to push off of something to help propel them forward. What they find to push off of changes how they are able to move.

F-22 Raptor 9g Turns

Fighter jets push the limits of what can be done in aviation. When a jet pulls 9 g's the pilot can easily lose consciousness. To make these extreme turns, a drastic change can be seen around the airplane.

Jupiter Asteroids

Some astronomers believe that one reason Earth is habitable is that the gravity of Jupiter protects us from comets. Long-period comets, in particular, enter the solar system from its outer reaches. Jupiter’s gravity is thought to sling most of these fast-moving ice balls out of the solar system before they can get close to Earth.

Turbidity in H2O

When solid particles move through water their movement takes interesting forms around objects.

Nuclear Explosion

Video of a nuclear explosion.

Iris Wiggle

Eyes have structures within them to help focus objects to be seen.

Tesla Vision

Elon Musk's Tesla Motors utilizes am AI system to allow his cars to be placed on "autopilot" and drive themselves. While this is not entirely a self-driving car, it is proving to be extremely safe.

Penguin Water Exit

Penguins "fly" through the water yet commonly need to be able to launch out of the water onto large masses of ice.

Snakes Climbing

Trees are super hard to climb - even with hands! Snakes have no arms or legs yet seem to have figured out how to climb trees easily.

Squirting Cucumber

Most seeds use dispersal methods like wind, water, or by sticking to animals. Some plants have a very different method of dispersing their seeds.

Squirting Cucumber

UV Sun Damage

The sun is known to cause damage to our skin. While this damage can be seen in moles and skin cancer, UV light is able to detect sunlights damage when viewed through a UV lens.

Bat Sprints

Only 1 out of 1300 species of bat is able to run along the ground. This vampire bat is able to use its' wings to run along the ground.

Winter vs. Summer

The summer solstice is the longest day (most daylight hours) of the year for people living in the northern hemisphere. It is also the day that the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky. The winter solstice, or the shortest day of the year, happens when the Earth's North Pole is tilted farthest from the Sun.

Finger Safe Saw

This saw is able to sense the difference between cutting through wood and hitting human flesh. When it hits something that it senses as human flesh it immediately stops.

Woodpecker Slow-Mo

A woodpecker’s skull is like an internal helmet to keep its brain from getting hurt. Woodpeckers’ heads are kind of like bike shocks for their brains. The bones in a woodpecker’s skull keep its brain safe and avoids concussions.

Slug Lunch

Most species of slugs are generalists, feeding on a number of organic materials, including leaves, lichens, mushrooms, and even carrion. Some slugs are predators and eat other slugs and snails, or earthworms.

Owl vs. Hawk

Roosting hawks do not hear the silent flight of a large owl who takes one hawk and is gone before the other seems to notice.

Doppler Effect

Sound may appear to be an independent phenomenon, but our perception of sound waves is affected by speed. Austrian physicist Christian Doppler discovered that when a moving object such as a siren produces sound waves, the waves bunch in front of the object and disperse behind it. This induced wave disturbance, known as the Doppler Effect, causes the sound of an approaching object to rise in pitch due to wavelength shortening. When the object passes, the trailing waves extend and are perceived lower in pitch. The Doppler Effect is also seen in the bunching of waves in front of a ship and the dispersing wake.

Granulocytes kill Cancer

Human granulocytes killing cervical cancer cells.

Physics Escape

This man uses physics to help him escape from a hole in the ground.

Hot Fireflies

Organisms have many different ways of communicating. Fireflies communicate by flashes of light to attract mates or prey. Fireflies use bioluminescence to create these flashes, but apparently the light emitted from a LED is close enough to 'speak' to this firefly!

Changing Rivers

Rivers change their course over time due to a number of different factors. While erosion difficult to study, as it occurs over long periods of time, satellite images can be used to allow us to see changes in landforms. These images of the Ucayali River are placed together allowing us to see 30 years of changes in a few seconds.

Bee Pheromones

When a queen bee became locked inside a car - the rest of the swarm followed for 2 days until they were collected by an entomologist.

How could the bees know she was in there? How were they able to pick the exact car she was in?!?

Oranges & Balloons

Squeezing the outside of an orange onto balloons causes them to pop. While the acid of the orange would make sense in explaining this - it might eat away at the surface of the balloon, that is not why this happens. The juice of the orange does not make them pop, only by squeezing the outside of the rind.

Swallowing Spiders

Along the legs of spiders are chemoreceptors, kind of like how we think of a nose. These chemoreceptors on the legs of spiders can sense a number of chemicals, and are there to avoid predators, and to seek out prey.

If a spider was to come close to our mouth when we were sleeping it would sense 1000’s of different chemicals in our breath. From the toothpaste, to the evening meal and even the carbon dioxide we breath out - a spider would be able to tell that a massive and dangerous mouth is nearby, and it would move in the opposite direction.

Worm Poop

During the rainy season in Columbia and Venezuela, an odd landscape feature appears in places: mounds of grassy plants, as big as five meters across and two meters tall, surrounded by water. Traversing this landscape, called surales, requires either hopping from mound to mound or trudging through the boggy bits in between.

What causes these mounds was a mystery - until recently scientists discovered they are created by earthworm poop.

Backwards Venus

Venus spins backwards compared to most of the other planets. It spins in the opposite direction that Earth rotates. This means that on Venus the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

Hydromedusa

Hydromedusa, a type of small jellyfish, likely belonging to the genus Crossota. Its tentacles are used to ensnare and subdue prey, which is why you see it floating with them outstretched in the beginning of the video — it was lying in wait for a fish to swim by.

Jellyfish: April 24, 2016

X's or O's?!?

If you spin a piece of PVC with your finger, you can only see the letter that you had your finger on when you started spinning it. If you start on the "X" - you can only see the X. If you start on the "O" you can only see the O.

X's and O's

Virus Spreaders

Airblade-type models spread 1,300 times more viral plaque-forming units than paper towels. Compared to “warm air” dryers, Airblades spread 60 times the amount. Among the grossest of their results, they found that jet dryers can fling viruses up to 3 meters (10 feet), while standard warm air dryers only managed 75 centimeters (2.5 feet) and hand towels just 25 centimeters (10 inches).

Blue Birds Aren't Blue

Red and yellow feathers get their color from nutrients that are in the foods birds eat - but the color blue is fairly rare in nature. The color blue that we see on a bird is created by the way light waves interact with the feathers and their arrangement of protein molecules, called keratin. Different keratin structures reflect light in subtly different ways to produce different shades of what our eyes perceive as the color blue. This makes blue birds a result of feather structure and not pigment.

Ice Spikes

Ice spikes are odd ice structures that occasionally grow out of ice cube trays. Unlike some of the strange things you might find growing in your refrigerator, ice spikes are made of nothing but ice. Some find that their tap water commonly creates ice spike while others can only cause these structures to form with distilled water.

Comb Jellies are Delicious

Comb Jellies have groups of cilia that help them move through the water. They are the largest animals that move using only cilia and their bodies consist of a mass of jelly with with 1-2 layers of cells on the outside and inside. Most comb jellies are predators and can consume ten times their weight per day.

Diving between Continents

Landforms are much more than just mountains, rivers, and hills. They are incredible in their diversity and scale of these are sometimes hard to imagine.

Snow Trees

In the Finnish Lapland, weather can include sub-freezing temperatures and driving snow. Surreal landscapes sometimes result, where common trees become cloaked in white and look like frozen sculptures.

Trees in Winter

The picture was taken last winter in Finnish Lapland where weather can include sub-freezing temperatures and driving snow. Surreal landscapes sometimes result, where common trees become cloaked in white and so appear, to some, as watchful aliens or bizarre statues.

Cypress Knees

A cypress knee is a distinctive structure forming above the roots of a cypress tree of any of various species of the subfamily Taxodioideae. Their function is unknown, but they are generally seen on trees growing in swamps.

Snow Donuts

These rare shapes are formed—under perfect temperature conditions only—when a mass of snow either falls or is blown by the wind. If it manages to catch on to some other snow, and gravity or the wind is in its favor, then the new snowball will roll itself in the exact same way we all used to. In this case, though, the middles tend to collapse to create a donut shape, which can end up as tall as 26 inches (66 cm).

Snow Donuts

Spider Web

The Gladiator Spider can make an expandable sticky web like a net. When an insect passes below it, it stretches out the net, lunges downwards and flings the net over the prey.

Floating M's

When M&M's are placed in warm water the candy coating dissolves and colors the water - but the little "M's" don't dissolve and float to the surface.

Columnar Basalt

These unique formations are a result of lava flows cracking as they cool, in a perpendicular direction to the original flow. Columnar basalt clusters can be found all over the world.

Columnar Basalt

Magnets & Copper

When a magnet falls it induces a current in the copper pipe.

That current creates a magnetic field that opposes the changing field of the falling magnet, so the magnet is repelled and falls more slowly. It almost looks like it's floating through the pipe.

Brinicles

When the surface of the sea freezes—such as around the north and south poles—it does so in a way that forces pockets of especially cold and salty seawater to gather on the underside of the ice. This mixture of brine is denser than the seawater below it, and as a result it tends to slowly sink to the bottom. Now, because it’s so cold, the fresher water below the brine actually freezes around it as it falls, which results in a giant icicle under the surface.

Frozen Hot Water

Water is the most important liquid on Earth. It’s is also one of the most mysterious and counterintuitive compounds in nature. One of water’s lesser know properties, for example, is that hot water freezes faster than cold water. It is not fully understood why, but the phenomenon, known as the Mpemba effect, was originally discovered by Aristotle over 3,000 years ago. The mysterious effect has been attributed to a range of phenomena, but it remains a mystery.

Prince Rupert's Drops

Prince Rupert's Drops are tadpole-esque structures formed by simply dropping hot molten glass into cold water. While the drops look pretty cool, what’s even more intriguing is that they have some unique materials properties. The rapid solidification process toughens the glass by creating a high compressive strength exterior with a high tensile strength interior, so the drops resist shattering when slammed with a hammer. But, they easily explode with just a little distortion to the tail.

Sailing Stones

Sailing Stones in Death Valley, are a geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. Stones with rough bottoms leave straight striated tracks while those with smooth bottoms tend to wander.

Windchill

Our experience of temperature is pretty subjective. Humidity, individual physiology, and even our mood can change our perception of hot and cold temperatures. It’s the same with wind chill: the temperature that we normally feel is not the true temperature. The air immediately surrounding the human body is warmed by body heat and stays around the body as a sort of “air cloak”. This insulating cushion of air actually keeps people warm. When the wind blows on you, the cushion of air is blown away, and you are exposed to the true temperature, which feels much colder. Wind chill only affects entities that produce heat.

Human Loop

We’ve seen people on skateboards and motorcycles loop the loop many times. Damian Walter was the first human to figure out how do it on foot.

Slinky Free-fall

When a slinky is held extended off of the ground, and then is dropped - the bottom does not seem to move until the top of the slinky catches up with it.

Ears are Structures with Function

The fennec fox of North Africa has large ears which serve a dual purpose: they are great for listening for bugs to eat that may be moving around underground, but they are also loaded with blood vessels, allowing the animals to dissipate excess body heat. While big ears are wonderful radiators during hot days, the fox’s thick fur coat also acts as insulation during cold desert nights.

Tree Mass

A tree gets its mass from air and water. It "eats" air, chomps down on airborne carbon dioxide, then uses sunshine to pull the carbon dioxide apart, gets rid of the oxygen, which it spits back into the air, leaving the carbon and water, the stuff to make the substance of the tree.

Thorny Devil's Drink

In the Australian Outback, pooled water can be extremely hard to come by. To deal with this issue, the thorny devil has developed skin that can absorb water like blotter paper (called “capillary action”). The way the scales on the body are structured, it collects dew and channels it down to the corners of the mouth, where the lizard drinks it. You can actually watch the lizard’s skin darken as it soaks up whatever liquid remains from even the muckiest of puddles.

Exploding Seeds

Seed dispersal is commonly done through using the wind, or water - but some seed pods have another way. These plants have seed pods with plant structures that allow them to react explosively to disperse their seeds.

Another iteration of Australia's famous Morning Glory, this time with multiple roll clouds. The area around Burketown is known for the phenomenon, most likely to appear between September and mid-November.

Rubber Ducks Float

How can little pebbles sink to the bottom of a cup of water but giant things like boats (and huge rubber ducks) can float?

Deer Migration

Researchers have only recently found the longest large mammal migration in the continental United States: Mule deer migrate 150 miles (241 kilometers) in western Wyoming each year. And it's no easy task for them-barriers include highways, fences, tough terrain, and bodies of water.

Deer Migration

Spinning Galaxies

Disc galaxies, like our own Milky Way, spin so fast that they should fly apart. The force of gravity produced by all the stars and dust and everything else we can see is not enough to hold them together.

This is a problem. Either our best theories about gravity are totally wrong over glalactic distances or there is some “dark” matter adding mass to galaxies. If this dark matter exists, we can’t see or detect it or even guess what it is, but it must make up almost 90% of the mass of the universe.

Candle Wax

Candles come in all sorts of different shapes, colors, and sizes. When they are lit, the fire wick burns down and the wax melts. Somehow there seems to be much less wax left as the candle burns.

Cheerios Effect

Cheerios, or any floating objects, in a bowl of milk will clump together and cling to the sides. Even if stirred up with a spoon, they will come back together when coming to a rest.

Laser Rust Removal

Rust can be removed from metal with a laser beam.

Laser Rust Removal

Ice Fumaroles

A normal fumarole is a vent that protrudes from the ground, allowing steam from volcanoes to escape out into the open. Of course, arctic volcanoes have fumaroles, too, but it's so cold that steam particles freeze upon contact with the outside air, building up and up until you eventually get massive, 60-foot-high "ice chimneys" inexplicably shooting hot air out into the arctic wasteland.

Moonbows

If the conditions are just right, you can see Moonbows (also called lunar rainbows) with the naked eye, if you're paying attention to the sky opposite the moon. For once, the explanation is simple: Moonbows work exactly like rainbows and appear whenever bright moonlight refracts just so off of moisture in the air.

Nacreous Clouds

Nacreous clouds, are clouds in the winter polar stratosphere at altitudes of 15,000–25,000 meters (49,000–82,000 ft). They are best observed during civil twilight when the sun is between 1 and 6 degrees below the horizon. They are implicated in the formation of ozone holes. The effects on ozone depletion arise because they support chemical reactions that produce active chlorine which catalyzes ozone destruction, and also because they remove gaseous nitric acid, perturbing nitrogen and chlorine cycles in a way which increases ozone destruction.

Sinkhole

Sinkholes are common where the rock below the land surface is limestone, carbonate rock, salt beds, or rocks that can naturally be dissolved by groundwater circulating through them. As the rock dissolves, spaces and caverns develop underground. Sinkholes are dramatic because the land usually stays intact for a while until the underground spaces just get too big. If there is not enough support for the land above the spaces then a sudden collapse of the land surface can occur. These collapses can be small, or, as this picture shows, or they can be huge and can occur where a house or road is on top.

The most damage from sinkholes tends to occur in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.

Moon Phases

Hydra Mouth

Every time this pond-dweller wants to eat — for example a little brine shrimp — it rips a hole through the center of its body’s outer layer. When dinner is done, it closes back up.

Fairy Circles

Fairy Circles are barren circular patches of dirt surrounded by plants found in the very arid deserts of Africa and Australia. They have baffled scientists for years and hypothesis included plant self organization and possibly even termites.

Rose of Jericho

A Rose of Jericho three hours after being watered having nearly returned to is previous, alive, state!

The Rose of Jericho (Anastatica hierochuntica) is a species of resurrection plant. These plants are characterized by their ability to utilize mechanisms which enable them to survive extreme dehydration for years at a time.